Archive for March, 2010

It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We’re on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.

At your next dinner party, here are some of the latest talking points to bring up when someone reminds you that Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work on global warming. (more…)

In 1970, the Bay of Bengal was struck by the very powerful Bhola Cyclone. This was a truly disastrous event with a casualty in the order of 500,000 people. This event also caused severe coastal damage. Vast quantities of sediment were set in suspension, and there were significant turbidity flows.

At the boarder between India and Bangladesh, these sediments transported down the river accumulated in a muddy sand-bar that grew into an island. This newly-created islandcame to be called South Talpatti or New Moore Island.

There is nothing strange in this. Islands come and go for local reasons triggered by sudden events and longer-term dynamic forces. (more…)

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.

The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” This led to demands in America for a “cow tax” and a campaign in Europe at the time of the Copenhagen car crash last December called Less Meat=Less Heat. (more…)

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted for the first time last month that it is facing a crisis of confidence. But the IPCC’s failings go far beyond the recent spate of errors identified in its reports. The problem began with the global political climate that led to the formation of the IPCC two decades ago.

Contrary to popular perception, the IPCC is not a scientific organization. It does no research of its own. Composed of scientists nominated by different governments, its key function is to collate evidence of human-induced climate change, not just changes in climate. (more…)

The “hockey stick” temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man’s efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes

Messy, truncated data? Trees on the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada: one of several pieces of evidence for rising temperatures that have been called into question

Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph. (more…)

Background
The authors write that “in the influential fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rosenzweig et al. (2007) tested several thousand time-series data sets for changes in species behavior and geographic range consistent with climate change, reaching the conclusion that it is very likely that climate change is driving changes in natural biological systems.” However, they say that “the use of such large data sets in meta-analyses may discourage the close inspection of observations and result in naively misattributing observed shifts to climate when other explanations may be more parsimonious.” (more…)

Description
Working with 20 ice core records from 14 different sites, all of which stretched at least 200 years back in time, as well as near-surface air temperature data from 13 locations along the southern and western coasts of Greenland that covered approximately the same time interval (1784-2005), plus a similar temperature data set from northwest Iceland (said by the authors to be employed “in order to have some data indicative of climate east of the Greenland ice sheet”), Vinther et al. proceeded to demonstrate that winter ?18O was “the best proxy for Greenland temperatures.” Then, based on that determination and working with three longer ice core ?18O records (DYE-3, Crete and GRIP), they developed a temperature history that extended more than 1400 years back in time. In describing this record, the seven scientists said that “temperatures during the warmest intervals of the Medieval Warm Period,” which they defined as occurring “some 900 to 1300 years ago, “were as warm as or slightly warmer than present day Greenland temperatures [italics added].” Hence, we conclude that for southwest Greenland, various portions of the MWP (AD 700-1100) were warmer than they have been over the last several years. (more…)

They’re at it again. The world-government wannabes of the UN have summoned 192 nations to meet in Bonn, Germany, in the second week of April to plan another attempt to impose an unelected global government on us in the specious name of Saving The Planet.

The Planet, of course, was Saved 2000 years ago, and it does not need to be Saved again. But the international corporatists, fascists, communists – call them what you will, but they are certainly not believers in democracy in any shape or form – know that they cannot get away with setting up their long-planned dismal bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship unless they pretend that a global emergency demands it.

At the very moment when the science behind the “global warming” scare has abjectly collapsed, and “global warming” profiteers and data-fabricators around the world are facing prosecution for false accounting, scientific and financial fraud, and outright racketeering, the fraudsters and racketeers will be in Bonn planning to give themselves a free pardon as they inflict upon us a ruthless and monstrously expensive regime of taxation without representation, regulation without election, and economic interference without democracy. (more…)

This article was written on October 31 and updated November 3, before the ‘Climategate’ CRU email scandal broke, and it is all the more pertinent in the light of those disclosures. The CRU emails show how science has been perverted into a political movement, and how scientists conspired to serve a ‘post-normal’ agenda where truth is trampled – exactly as the proponents of ‘post-normal’ science had anticipated. With the association between ‘post-normal’ science developed by Ravetz and its application in climate science by Hulme now widely exposed by this present post, Ravetz and Hulme jointly authored an article, published by the BBC on December 1, entitled ‘Show Your Working': What ‘ClimateGate’ means in which they sought to promote post-normal science further by capitalizing on the public disgust at the corruption of ‘normal’ science. This is cynical because normal science was corrupted by covertly introducing post-normal activities in the first place.

WHAT has become of science? We thought that science was about the pursuit of truth. Then we became perplexed at how quickly scientists have prostituted themselves in the service of political agendas. We have seen the unedifying spectacle of scientists refusing to share their data, fiddling their results, and resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who have exposed their work to be fraudulent. We have seen the Royal Society becoming a shamelessly crude advocacy society. We have seen President Obama choosing notorious climate alarmists and liars to be his personal advisors. We have seen the peer review process and journal editors colluding to prevent publication of results that do not serve the politically-correct agenda, and scientists refusing to consider results that demolish their pet theories. What is going on here? (more…)

Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing “decline” in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original “hide the decline” statement comes from the ClimateGate e-mails and refers to “hiding” the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It’s known as the “divergence problem” because tree rings diverge from the allegedly measured temperatures. But, Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs, and that real measured temperatures did decline from 1960 onwards…sharply. Yet, in the GISS version of that period, temperatures from the cold 1970’s were repeatedly “adjusted” years later, and progressively made warmer.

The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later, this was reduced so far it became a mild warming againstthe detailed corroborating roabcore evidence. Raobcore measurements are balloon readings. How accurate are they? They started in 1958, twenty years before satellite temperature records (which are renowned for their accuracy). Put the two methods side-by-side, and they tie together neatly, telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.

You can see how similar the data from both methods is:

So what do the raobcores tell us about the period before satellites started recording temperatures? They make it clear that temperatures fell quickly from 1960 to 1970.

The decline in the original graph in National Geographic in 1976 is apparently backed up by highly accurate balloon recordings, and was based on peer reviewed data: Budyko 1969 and Angell and Korshover (1975). These two sets overlap from 1958 to 1960, and correlate well, so stitching them together is reasonable, and it doesn’t make much difference which year is chosen from the overlap (indeed any other choice makes the decline slightly steeper).

What’s thought-provoking is that the raobcore data above is for 30N-30S, covering all the tropics on both sides of the equator, and still shows the decline. This begs the question of whether the Southern Hemisphere data has been adjusted too. It would be good to see the raobcore sets farther towards the Arctic. It would also be good to look at the Southern Hemisphere. Where are the data sets and peer reviewed papers on temperatures from 1965 to 1980? I hope someone does a follow-up on these, too.

Three decades of adjustments

When did the “funny business” begin? By 1980 Hansen and GISS had already produced graphs that were starting to neutralize the decline. His graphs of 1987 and 2007 further fudged the decline, until the cooling from 1960 to 1975 was completely lost.

(Click to see a larger image).

Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).

If 1958 temperatures were similar to the 1990’s, this rewrites the entire claim of unprecedented recent warming. Lansner also reminds us of the photos taken in the arctic by submarines that surfaced around the North Pole.

Last week the Garrison Institute, a retreat center just a few miles down the Hudson River from my home, hosted an impressive symposium on “Climate, Mind and Behavior.” An organizer made the mistake of inviting me to the meeting’s wrap-up session Friday.

As a brochure put it, the symposium brought together 75 “thought leaders and practitioners from the fields of neuro, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, policy, investing and social media to explore how to integrate emerging knowledge on the key drivers of behavior into solutions for solving the world’s most pressing problem: climate change.” (more…)

Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology has offered the following thoughtful essay for publication in Physics and Society. The essay has been mildly edited to add hyperlinks to backup or add context to some parts of the essay, and to follow Physics Today’s style guide when appropriate. This essay does not reflect the views of Physics Today or the American Institute of Physics, but of the opinion writer.

I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic. (more…)

I am an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and a co-organizer of a Petition drive to the APS Council to modify or withdraw the published APS Statement on Climate Change [see Nature 460:457, 23 July 2009]. Some 250 members and Fellows of the APS have now joined in signing this Petition, including members of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Nobelist, and many other prize winners.

I urge you to ignore all of the insubstantial criticisms leveled against your submission to the House of Commons’ inquiry into ClimateGate. All scientists should applaud your call for openness and sharing of data – even without the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, and regardless of one’s position on the causes of global warming. To echo Margaret Thatcher’s admonition to President George Bush: “Don’t go wobbly!” (more…)

The problem with official investigations into alleged corruption and fraud is the time it takes to set up the investigation… giving those involved a long period in which to invent explanations and stories. Will this happen with Climategate? Prof Jones of the CRU (Climate Research Unit, East Anglia University) has already tried to milk sympathy for himself and his appalling behaviour.

The Hearing

The Hearing has begun at the UK’s House of Commons. Why does this make me uneasy? Could it be the block-buster 2009 revelations about MPs (Members of Parliament) defrauding the expenses system? Or, could it be that the British government is intent on spreading CO2 and similar deceptions and following the EU program to tax member states to ‘stop’ non-existent global warming? Or, that some of the Committee are ardent pro-warmists?

It will be interesting to see how things develop, as the UK is on the verge of a General Election. (more…)

The Environmental Protection Agency recently concluded that man-made greenhouse gas emissions — including carbon dioxide — are harmful pollutants and must be regulated. The lawsuit I filed challenging that finding does not address the disputed science surrounding global warming. Instead, it focuses on the indisputable fact that the EPA relied on information that has been discredited, manipulated, lost or destroyed, and sometimes evaded peer review. The lawsuit does not attempt to show that the globe is not warming. It does, however, show that the process used by the EPA in deciding to regulate greenhouse gases is riddled with errors that render its conclusion untrustworthy.

Before regulating man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA was required to conduct a scientific assessment. Rather than conduct its own assessment, the EPA relied on reports by third parties. The EPA’s conclusions rest primarily on information gathered by a creation of the United Nations called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC — an organization that has become mired in scandal because the reliability, objectivity and scientific validity of its work has come under fire.(more…)